Education’s Role in Intergenerational Persistence

My thesis (Peng, 2025) focuses on the role of education in the cross-cohort changes of social mobility in China.

Abstract:

Children of parents with high-status occupations often end up working in high-status occupations, while their peers whose parents have low-status jobs often end up in low-status jobs. Education plays a pivotal and multifaceted role in this relative intergenerational occupation persistence. Rapid social and educational change in China, and especially the 1999 Higher Education Expansion, may have produced changes in education’s role in intergenerational persistence. I hypothesize that stratified higher education and occupation outcomes in the population may have strengthened intergenerational persistence, while growing percentages of college graduates, for whom occupational attainment tends to vary less by social origin, may have weakened persistence. Analyzing data from nine waves of Chinese General Social Survey, I first confirm that intergenerational occupational persistence in China remained stable between the 1964-1979 and 1980-1995 birth cohorts. Next, model-based simulations suggest that changes in (1) the association between parents’ occupation status and children’s educational attainment and (2) the correlation between children’s education and occupation status in adulthood decreased persistence, while changes in (3) the gaps in adult occupation status by parental occupation status among people with the same education and (4) the shares of the population in different educational groups increased persistence. Overall cross-cohort stability in intergenerational occupation persistence resulted from offsetting contributions of these four educational processes. However, the analyses are underpowered, and further efforts are needed to draw more definitive conclusions when new data are available.

Updates:

On July 5-6, 2025, I participated in the annual meeting of the Chinese Sociological Association, and presented this project.